Thursday, October 29, 2009

Terrorist Fist Bump

by digby

From the beginning of the GWOT, I have wondered when the whole "black muslim," Nation of Islam, prison gangs would become conflated with Islamic terrorism in the minds of racist Americans. During the campaign, the wingnuts certainly had no problem believing that Obama is a Muslim, because they simply think that all people of color are threatening and Islam is just an identification for dark enemy. The New Yorker cover and Jeremiah Wright controversies skirted around the issue a bit, but it never really got any traction.

I'm guessing this is going to give the racist wingnuts a major thrill up their legs:

After a 2-year investigation, FBI agents descended on a Dearborn warehouse Wednesday hoping to capture the suspected head of an Islamic fundamentalist group.

The scene quickly turned chaotic, however, in a shootout that caused agents to gun down Luqman Ameen Abdullah, 53, leader of the Masjid Al-Haqq mosque in Detroit. Abdullah is accused in a federal complaint of heading a Sunni Muslim group with the mission of establishing a separate Islamic nation within the United States.

Eleven other men were criminally charged in the raids, which also occurred in Detroit.

Abdullah, known to some as Christopher Thomas, died after firing on officers during the raid, the U.S. Attorney's Office said. An FBI dog also was fatally wounded.

The suspects "are members of a group that is alleged to have engaged in violent activity over a period of many years and known to be armed," a joint statement from the Detroit FBI and U.S. Attorney's Office said.

[...]

Abdullah, 53, of Detroit stayed true to his word Wednesday as armed FBI agents raided a Dearborn warehouse at Michigan Avenue and Miller. Four other suspects surrendered without incident. Authorities said Abdullah refused to surrender, opened fire and then died in a shootout in which an FBI dog also was killed.

"We're not any fake terrorists, we're the real terrorists," Abdullah once boasted to an undercover informant, according to the affidavit.

But this is the real kicker:

Federal officials said Abdullah was the leader of a group that calls itself "Ummah, a group of mostly African-American converts to Islam, which seeks to establish a separate Sharia-law governed state within the United States."

"The Ummah is ruled by Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, who is serving a state sentence ... for the murder of two police officers in Georgia."

Brown came to prominence in the 1960s as a leader of the Black Panther Party.

Read the whole thing, although by the time this is done I suspect you will know more about these guys than you ever cared to. It's quite a story. And it's going to feed the paranoid ravings of the toxic asylum that calls itself the right in all the predictable ways.